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10 Dec 2016 4:01:44pm

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This is a very interesting article.

"The problem is here the obvious arbitrariness of the proliferation of these ever-new rules."

With regard to the above comment I would like to comment though, that I think that women in particular fare very poorly in this climate. At a time when violence against women and girls around the world has reached epic proportions we find that our identity as women as a group of people with basic things in common, is being deconstructed almost to the point of erasure. With the dismantling of meta narratives and the continuing strength of the patriarchial construct of our culture, how can we come together if women, as an oppressed class, are so relentlessly undermined by liberal notions of choice, agency and empowerment? The charge of cultural imperialism and essentialism is seeing women marginalized and silenced – stories of the empowered sex worker, the agency of the lap dancer, or the woman choosing plastic sugery to confrom to beauty ideals, disguises the misery of so many women and girls who suffer self-loathing and or violence on a daily basis. Think of the prostituted women, the trafficked women, the one in five who will suffer sexual assault or the one who will die every week at the hands of an intimate partner. The rich,white men of privelige at the top end of town have capitalized – women's and girls' bodies from birth are a commodity. With the advent of neoliberalism in this postmodernism world abuse has soared – the exploitation of women as “gestational carriers” in India, the renewed political attack on women's reproductive rights, and the power and scope of the mega industries of pornography and prostitution, are a few examples. This is not all new, but it is misery and exploitation writ large and it's a pretty sad state of affairs after the gains made in the second wave of feminism. Liberalism has failed women in some very important ways.